AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to LLM-aided OCR – Correcting Tesseract OCR errors with LLMs

Almost exactly 1 year ago, I submitted something to HN about using Llama2 (which had just come out) to improve the output of Tesseract OCR by correcting obvious OCR errors [0]. That was exciting at the time because OpenAI's API calls were still quite expensive for GPT4, and the cost of running it on a book-length PDF would just be prohibitive. In contrast, you could run Llama2 locally on a machine with just a CPU, and it would be extremely slow, but "free" if you had a spare machine lying around. Well, it's amazing how things have changed since then. Not only have models gotten a lot better,…

LLM-aided OCR is a tool that corrects errors produced by Tesseract OCR using large language models. It works by breaking documents into chunks and processing them through APIs like OpenAI's GPT-4o-mini or Anthropic's… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. LLM-aided OCR – Correcting Tesseract OCR errors with LLMs launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1
Using LLama2 to Correct OCR Errors▲54
I've been disappointed by the very poor quality of results that I generally get when trying to run OCR on older scanned documents, especially ones that are typewritten or otherwise have unusual or irregular typography. I recently had the idea of using Llama2 to use common sense reasoning and subject level expertise to correct transcription errors in a "smart" way-- basically doing what a human proofreader who is familiar with the topic might do. I came up with the linked script that takes a PDF as input, runs Tesseract on it to get an initial text extraction, and then feeds this…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
2
Tesseract.js – Pure JavaScript OCR for 60 Languages▲727
Pure Javascript OCR for more than 100 Languages 📖🎉🖥 - naptha/tesseract.js
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
3
Llama 3.2 Interpretability with Sparse Autoencoders▲579
I spent a lot of time and money on this rather big side project of mine that attempts to replicate the mechanistic interpretability research on proprietary LLMs that was quite popular this year and produced great research papers by Anthropic [1], OpenAI [2] and Deepmind [3]. I am quite proud of this project and since I consider myself the target audience for HackerNews did I think that maybe some of you would appreciate this open research replication as well. Happy to answer any questions or face any feedback. Cheers [1]…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
4
Qwen-2.5-32B is now the best open source OCR model▲211
Last week was big for open source LLMs. We got: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) - Gemma-3 (27b) - DeepSeek-v3-0324 And a couple weeks ago we got the new mistral-ocr model. We updated our OCR benchmark to include the new models. We evaluated 1,000 documents for JSON extraction accuracy. Major takeaways: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) are by far the most impressive. Both landed right around 75% accuracy (equivalent to GPT-4o’s performance). Qwen 72b was only 0.4% above 32b. Within the margin of error. - Both Qwen models passed mistral-ocr (72.2%), which is specifically trained for OCR. - Gemma-3…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
5
LLM Aided Transcription Improvement▲11
I recently submitted another project for using LLMs to correct errors and improve formatting of OCRed documents which was well received. The low cost and high quality/speed of the latest "value tier" models from OpenAI and Anthropic have made it possible to get compelling results at a very reasonable price in that application. It occured to me that the same approach taken there (namely, splitting documents into chunks and sending each chunk through a chain of LLM prompts that each take the output of the previous prompt and apply an additional layer of processing) could be easily applied…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
6
PDF to MD by LLMs – Extract Text/Tables/Image Descriptives by GPT4o▲191
I've developed a Python API service that uses GPT-4o for OCR on PDFs. It features parallel processing and batch handling for improved performance. Not only does it convert PDF to markdown, but it also describes the images within the PDF using captions like `[Image: This picture shows 4 people waving]`. In testing with NASA's Apollo 17 flight documents, it successfully converted complex, multi-oriented pages into well-structured Markdown. The project is open-source and available on GitHub. Feedback is welcome.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
7
BetterOCR combines and corrects multiple OCR engines with an LLM▲63
🔍 Better text detection by combining multiple OCR engines (EasyOCR, Tesseract, and Pororo) with 🧠 LLM. - junhoyeo/BetterOCR
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
8
OpenUI▲322
Thesys just open-sourced their generative UI rendering engine. Interesting timing given where Google a2ui and Vercel's json-render are headed. The difference worth noting: a2ui and json-render both treat JSONL as the contract between the LLM and the renderer. Thesys is betting that's the wrong primitive. Their engine uses a code-like syntax (OpenUI Lang) instead — LLM writes it, renderer executes it. The argument is that LLMs are fundamentally better at generating code than generating structured data, so you get cleaner output and ~67% fewer tokens. The broader vision seems to be a…
Mar 2026 · openui.com · its alternatives →
9
Finetune LLaMA-7B on commodity GPUs using your own text▲449
I've been playing around with https://github.com/zphang/minimal-llama/ and https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora/blob/main/finetune.py, and wanted to create a simple UI where you can just paste text, tweak the parameters, and finetune the model quickly using a modern GPU. To prepare the data, simply separate your text with two blank lines. There's an inference tab, so you can test how the tuned model behaves. This is my first foray into the world of LLM finetuning, Python, Torch, Transformers, LoRA, PEFT, and Gradio. Enjoy!
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
10
Llama 2▲263
The next generation of Meta's open source LLM
2023 · developer.meta.com · its alternatives →
11
OCR Arena – A playground for OCR models▲216
I built OCR Arena as a free playground for the community to compare leading foundation VLMs and open-source OCR models side-by-side. Upload any doc, measure accuracy, and (optionally) vote for the models on a public leaderboard. It currently has Gemini 3, dots.ocr, DeepSeek, GPT5, olmOCR 2, Qwen, and a few others. If there's any others you'd like included, let me know!
Nov 2025 · ocrarena.ai · its alternatives →
12
OpenLIT – Open-Source LLM Observability with OpenTelemetry▲62
Hey HN, we're super excited to share something we've been working on: OpenLIT. After an engaging preview that some of you might recall, we are now proudly announcing our first stable release! *What's OpenLIT?* Simply put, OpenLIT is an open-source tool designed to make monitoring your Large Language Model (LLM) applications straightforward. It’s built on OpenTelemetry, aiming to reduce the complexities that come with observing the behavior and usage of your LLM stack. *Beyond Basic Text Generation:* OpenLIT isn’t restricted to just text and chatbot outputs. It now includes automatic…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
13
OpenLLMetry – OpenTelemetry-based observability for LLMs▲154
Hey HN, Nir, Gal and Tomer here. We’re open-sourcing a set of extensions we’ve built on top of OpenTelemetry that provide visibility into LLM applications - whether it be prompts, vector DBs and more. Here’s the repo: https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry. There’s already a decent number of tools for LLM observability, some open-source and some not. But what we found was missing for all of them is that they were closed-protocol by design, vendor-locking you to use their observability platform or their proprietary framework for running your LLMs. It’s still early in the…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
14
tesserocr – A Python wrapper for the tesseract-ocr API▲78
A Python wrapper for the tesseract-ocr API. Contribute to sirfz/tesserocr development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
15
TensorZero▲307
Hi HN! We're Gabriel & Viraj, and we're excited to open source TensorZero. To be a little cheeky, TensorZero is an open-source platform that helps LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products. 1. Integrate our model gateway 2. Send metrics or feedback 3. Unlock compounding improvements in quality, cost, and latency It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying: • Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead • Observability: inference & feedback → your database • Optimization: better prompts, models, inference strategies • Experimentation:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
16
A fully open-source (Apache 2.0)implementation of llama▲158
We believe that AI should be fully open source and part of the collective knowledge. The original LLaMA code is GPL licensed which means any project using it must also be released under GPL. This "taints" any other code and prevents meaningful academic and commercial use. Lit-LLaMA solves that for good.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
17
DeepSeek-OCR▲350
Advanced visual-text compression technology
2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
18
80% faster, 50% less memory, 0% loss of accuracy Llama finetuning▲385
Hi HN! I'm just sharing a project I've been working on during the LLM Efficiency Challenge - you can now finetune Llama with QLoRA 5x faster than Huggingface's original implementation on your own local GPU. Some highlights: 1. Manual autograd engine - hand derived backprop steps. 2. QLoRA / LoRA 80% faster, 50% less memory. 3. All kernels written in OpenAI's Triton language. 4. 0% loss in accuracy - no approximation methods - all exact. 5. No change of hardware necessary. Supports NVIDIA GPUs since 2018+. CUDA 7.5+. 6. Flash Attention support via Xformers. 7. Supports 4bit and 16bit…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
19
LLM Gatewayfree tier▲296
I built an OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway that routes requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, vLLM, llama-server, SGLang... anything that speaks /v1/chat/completions. Single Go binary, one YAML config file, no infrastructure. It does the things you'd expect from this kind of gateway... semantic routing via a three-layer cascade (keyword heuristics, embedding similarity, LLM classifier) that picks the best model when clients omit the model field, weighted round-robin load balancing across local inference servers with health checks and failover. The part I think is most…
2025 · llmgateway.io · its alternatives →
20
Llama▲312
3.1-405B: an open source model to rival GPT-4o / Claude-3.5
2024 · developer.meta.com · its alternatives →
21
I just open sourced my document/website extractor for Vision-LLMs▲37
Hi HackerNews, Lately, I have seen an explosion in posts offering paid APIs/services to get unstructured data into LLMs (i.e. langchain extract, ragflow, unstructured, unstract, just to name a few) and I have been largely disappointed by them, either because they fail to implement multimodal support, fail to give good context for "really tricky" PDFs / Word docs / Powerpoints, or are just plain difficult to use. In light of all these posts I figured I'd share my solution that has been working smoothly for me and my clients. I put it up on GitHub for free so you can check it…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
22
traceAI▲273
Open-source LLM tracing that speaks GenAI, not HTTP.
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
23
Openlit▲152
One click observability & evals for LLMs & GPUs
2024 · openlit.io · its alternatives →
24
Beyond text splitting – improved file parsing for LLMs▲206
Improved file parsing for LLM’s. Contribute to Filimoa/open-parse development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →